I Looked Alive by Gary Lutz (2010)

This is apparently an expanded edition of a collection of stories first published in 2003. The main analogy I'm going to use is the unlikely one of bells. If we imagine that any given author is a bell, we can think about all sorts of elements contributing. The material of which the bell is made; how decorated it is; the sound. Not sure what material the Lutz bell sports, but it is extraordinarily deeply decorated - in other words, he's doing a lot with the language. His experiment is to collate, fold and interfile the words of English into highly expressive belts, along the planes of which unusual combinations point to rare expressions, where implications are built up with not quite the usual suspects. This bell-decoration is sometimes a peculiarly successful experiment - the implications are strangely apt and illustrate patterns of thought or ways of mind limpidly. At other times there's only one word for them: tryhard. Baroque forcedness. Like an unnatural lump to be got over. So the decoration of this bell is a mixed bag, but admirable from the point of view of the fact that it's an experiment given to us in what feels like a molten state; this does not feel like finished experimental fiction, like many a piece in that genre, but rather almost a notebook of goes at a target. Lutz's people are the ones you may imagine in inner cities, or spiritually like places - people who have a lot of ordinary sex and kinkier sex, a lot of issues, nip down the street a bit wobblily in dark clothes, are seen maybe a bit more at night but still crustily during the day, often look a bit thin or pockmarked with whacked hair, look like they might have reputations for looseness somewhere, wander from relationship to relationship, polyping from world to world leaving behind messes and moving on. In attempting those generics I am trying to find the sound of this bell. Really the resound of it. Because that's what it seems to me often to lack. I would reach the end of a piece and feel the need to shrug. Why doesn't this resound more? Why is its impact often a dulled thud? Maybe because Lutz is so close to the action in these (most of them have a first person narrator which could well be him) that they're seen at too tight a register? Or maybe just because sometimes when the expression is too over-milled, the experimental bell cracks under the heat.

Commonplace Book

'"...It seems to me that there is a moment when the soul's beauty and the body's beauty are one. That moment is youth. All fresh and unused, the body is then as beautiful as the soul, but soon, alas! the body, being made of perishable stuff, begins to wear, and less and less resembles the soul within. The soul is growing more beautiful, perhaps, every day, but the body is dying. In vain it strives to answer to the soul within. I know you will say that some old faces are beautiful. They are, but it is a negative beauty, like the beauty of what we call skeleton leaves - the beauty of a clean decay..."'

from The Love Letters of the King by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter XVIII)

Commonplace Book

'...impregnated as they were with that immediacy of impression which words, simple enough, written in an emotional present, are sometimes able to retain far into the future, when perhaps the opportunities of such emotion can occur no more. Such is the value of a journal, such is the value of all concrete expression. A journal of old feeling is like a telescope through which we see the past history of the heart, not as a mere hazy cloud of distant glory, but separate star by star, moment by moment. The old agonies, the old ecstasies, may thus be repeated for us, as by some diabolical marvel of physical science...'

from The Love Letters of the King by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter XV)